See, during the past months of revision, I daydreamed about starting a new story. I’d sit next to a waterlily-filled pond somewhere, seized by inspiration, scribbling down long, brilliant paragraphs. (Why a pond? Especially since Laptop+Water= Tragedy) Anyway, my thoughts would weave themselves together, creating a manuscript with a beginning you couldn’t put down, an intriguing middle, AND a surprising, yet inevitable ending.

Instead, I’ve found the process of writing a first draft just like I remembered it, clumsy and full of doubt. And clumsy isn’t fun. Surprisingly, neither is doubt.

And suddenly, I wished I was revising again. In hindsight, revision seems like strolling through a lovely greenhouse, rearranging plants, watering this one here, pruning that one there. Now, I find myself back on a dusty plain with a handful of seeds and a empty watering can. True, I can create whatever I want in this vast open space, but first I have to find some water, figure out what kind of seeds I have, and get digging. All of this is awkward, hard work that leaves your hands calloused and caked with mud.

Wow. Sorry, I guess I got a little carried away with myself there. Plus now, I have two competing metaphors. Puppies and gardening. Hmmm… better throw in a third one, just for good measure.

Vroom! Meep, Meep!

Right now, in the middle of my first draft, I can hear the Road Runner, I can see him, but he just keeps racing in dizzying circles around me. For the last few weeks, I’ve been forging ahead anyway. Since I know my beginning and I know my ending, surely I can find a path between the two points. But somewhere in the middle there, the story gets boring. And I’ve learned to heed the warning signs. When you sit down to write a scene and you think to yourself, ‘Ugh!’ then whoever reads it is going to think ‘Ugh!’ too.

I’ve figured out that something is missing in my story and it’s as elusive and taunting as the Road Runner himself. But this morning and every morning, I will sit down at my computer and start again, creating contraptions, building traps, and scheming new schemes. After all, I’m Wile E. Coyote, Suuuuuper Gen-i-us and I’m bound to catch him sometime, right?

Right?

Anyway, Rick Castle occasionally wears a bullet proof vest, but instead of ‘POLICE,’ his says ‘WRITER.’ My friend, and brilliant writer, Alexandra Amor recently asked me, “What writer couldn’t use one of those?”

Her question got me thinking about the public and private nature of writing stories. One day we see something, maybe a dog wearing goggles and riding around in a basket on a motorcycle. And we think, who buys their dog goggles?

Or we eavesdrop on a strange couple at a restaurant and hear the woman say to the man, “That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me all day!” and you wonder, what else has he said to her?  And poof! A story is born.

Then we go to our computers and start typing away, creating a whole world out of that one little question. This process is done in a state of delusion. The delusions that we can make people see the same thing we do. Because even if we write in a coffee shop, surrounded by people, we’re alone in our imaginations, trying to translate what’s in our heads onto paper.

So, in our vacuum, we scribble, tweak, and rearrange until everything’s as perfect as we can get it. Then we send our story out into the world. If we’re unlucky, it comes back to us, not quite right for the person we sent it to. And that hurts.

And if we’re lucky? Hundreds of people read it. Thousands. If we’re really really lucky? Hundreds of thousands. Millions even. Then we’re in real trouble.

Cause then our story, our rough translation of the masterpiece we envisioned, has to stand on its own. We have to rely on our string of words to weave worlds and speak the truth. Some people will love it and some people will hate it. And a few special people will see exactly what we saw. And for them the story will be magic and it will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

And through all of this, we, the writer, have to watch from the sidelines. All of the risk and none of the control. No wonder we need Kevlar.

For some people it might be the clickity-clack of typing. For others it’s the shush of a highlighter against manuscript pages. But for me it sounds like Battlestar Galactica.

Yes. My revision, at least for my current book, sounds like an epic battle for humanity. Every morning, I sit down and put on Bear McCreary’s brilliant Battlestar soundtrack. While I sip my coffee and look through email, I let my subconscious drift back to the story I’ve been working on. As taiko drums thrum through my keyboard and my pulse races with the music, my fictional world forms around me, along with the characters that I’d left, most likely in a lurch, the day before.

Then I’m ready to write.

All day as I fiddle with dialogue or hit the soul-crushing backspace button, the albums shuffle and repeat, keeping me in the writing trance. The repetition helps me weave a more consistent and vivid world. Like the trick of using 3 different senses to bring a climatic scene alive for a reader, the music helps bring the book alive for me. And like the music I’m listening to, my dark tones and themes repeat again and again, shifting and morphing through the pages.

Books don’t have soundtracks, but authors sometimes do. Writers often make playlists for their fictional characters to listen to. Or, like me, have specific music that they listen to while working on a specific story. Music is such a direct pipeline to our emotions, sweeping us up and away, that I wonder how much of the music we listen to makes it into the pages. And I wonder if my characters are humming along.

Amazingly, slowly, fantastic pictures of wizards or the vague dots of George Seurat take shape on that table. Until somewhere around New Years, the final piece goes in. A work of art assembled out of cardboard.

Putting together a story is pretty similar. You get all your pieces out there and start moving them around, separating by patterns and colors. In the middle of everything else… doing the dishes, walking the dog, brushing your teeth…you saunter up sideways to whatever muddled ideas are floating around. And pretending like it’s no big deal, you turn them this was and that until, snap, something fits together.

This summer, I got in the holiday mood and bought a card table and a puzzle. I studiously put the border together and then promptly got distracted. And there the puzzle sat, in the middle of the living room for months and months. With dogs bumping the table legs and people putting their bags on it, and general chaos swirling around.

Until… I started revising again. I got some feedback on my novel that was insightful, completely true, and not a little overwhelming. Turns out, my story was close, but it still had holes in it. So, in the middle of trying to figure out how to fix my story, I wandered back to my puzzle.

It was a perfect activity to do while I was thinking about my book. The problem was that the puzzle, like my story, had been sitting there for months with life happening all around it. I was positive that I’d lost a piece of it by now.

And I had.

But what happened with the puzzle was amazingly close to what was happening in my writing life. As I put the puzzle together, lost pieces found their way back to me. A friend, who’d been at my house weeks before, mysteriously found a piece at the bottom of his bag. My husband found another on the floor right before the vacuum ate it.

When the puzzle was about 90% complete, I began to suspect that there was still one piece missing. Friends would look over my shoulder and ask “Where’s that piece?” Because they could see as clearly as I could that there were no more orange pieces left on the table.

“Um…maybe it’s there somewhere,” I’d say, waving vaguely at my ever dwindling pile of pieces.

I kept putting the picture together around it, stomach sinking. Hoping that by sheer force of will the piece would magically appear. Until finally, all the pieces were gone and there was still one gaping hole in the puzzle.

I looked around the table. I scoured the floor. I glared at my dog, who’d probably eaten it. Then in a fit of desperation… I looked in the box. And there, in the corner, was one lone puzzle piece. A smudge of orange that’d never been out on the table in the first place. Something that had been waiting all this time to complete the picture. Snap. It fit into place and there in front of me, with reds and yellows and all the oranges, was a phoenix rising up into the air.

Around the same time, I started working on a new book, replacing familiar characters with new ones. Then my computer died, taking some of my writing with it.

It wasn’t until my friend Edith, who I wrote with twice a week, announced she was moving that I recognized everything in my life was shifting. I was not impressed.

Change is hard. And it seems to come all at once, disrupting your schedule, switching the scenery, and upsetting the balance. This is just the way life works. To move forward, life must change. Sad or happy, it’s inevitable. And this is true with writing as well.

Except with writing, we’re inflicting the change on ourselves. We rearrange the furniture. Kill off characters. Add new ones. It’s the nature of revision, but at times I find myself hesitating. What if I mess it up? What if the things that are good about my story get lost?  Sometimes the story seems so close to being right, that it feels risky to change it.

But we have to.

If we want our stories to be everything we’ve imagined them to be in our heads… if I want the chance to share that story with the world… then we have no choice but to step forward. We have to take our story apart and put it back together again, trusting that what we rebuild will be stronger than before.

And the same is true with life. I will always miss my puppy. I will miss Edith and typing away next to her at the coffee shop. I will even miss my computer, bulky and covered with stickers. But as pieces of my life fall away, I have to believe that what is left, that what is coming next, will be strong and beautiful too.

For example, an upset stomach could just mean you ate too much Chunky Monkey.  Or it could mean you have appendicitis, vertigo, that you’re pregnant, have kidney failure, heart problems… or that you’re making yourself sick worrying that you have one of these things.  So pain in your stomach might not have anything to do with your stomach at all.

Same thing with a story.  Your critique group could tell you, “The dialogue’s not really flowing in this scene.”  And it’s probably true, but it might not be the actual problem.  The real problem could be that you, the writer, don’t know your character well enough to write them authentic dialogue.  Or maybe you’re trying to work information into the scene and it’s coming out forced.  Or that scene should come a lot earlier or later in the book.  Or maybe you have appendicitis.

The hardest part of revision is often tracking down the issue itself.  Because if you just take Tums, it might get rid of your stomach ache for a little while, but the real problem is gonna come back and kick you in the teeth.

Which brings me to the work I’ve been doing with my amazing agent, Michael Bourret.  It’s like he has a story CAT scan.  He’s got a knack for skipping past the symptoms and diagnosing the actual problem.  It’s heavenly.  It saves hours of needless hospital visits and doctors bills… (I’ll leave it up in the air as to whether that’s metaphorical or literal.)  Unfortunately, once I have diagnosis, I don’t always have the cure.  Sigh… I guess that’s what being a writer is all about.  Better go self-medicate.

So I finished my revision… now what?  As a way to deal with the dismal No Man’s Land that lurks between revisions and new projects, I’ve been getting crafty.  This past September at the SCBWI Working Writers’ Retreat, the creative Julie Williams gave us some unusual ideas about how to build an authentic world for our stories.  Found-book collages, paper dolls, and object-inspired writing exercises made me realize that there’s more to grounding yourself in a new world than outlines and brainstorms.

I’ve had some ‘in between’ time on my hands, so I pulled out my notes for my next book and got to work.  Or play, rather.  You can see I’ve made a mess. But that’s what it’s all about.  Or is that the hokey-pokey?

As I construct this world in a literal, hands-on way, specific and rich details are floating into my brain like gifts from the ether.  Scenes have begun playing themselves out in front of me and characters are finding forms.

It’s been a fantastic way to travel from the analytical territory of revisions to the open space of creation. And it’s reminded me that this whole venture is supposed to be fun.  Here’s a peek at the world I’m just starting to imagine.

Up, Up and Away!

And for a while I was meticulous about the garden. The watering, the weeding, sometimes just going outside to admire it. I fought to save plants in distress and glowed when people complemented the flowers.

But somewhere around August it all went horribly wrong. Carnivorous plants devoured the weaker, less ambitious ones. A potted plant died a long and arduous death and I didn’t replace it. I skipped a watering day here or there. Then came the vacation.

I went out of town for a couple of weeks. When I got back, despite my neighbors’ best efforts, my garden was a mess. My basil had grown into a tree, my roses were sagging, and my window box could only be described as brown. Since I got back, I’ve been avoiding eye contact with them all. Watering them only when the guilt got too much. I just couldn’t face the overgrown, weedy mess I’d made.

Then today, I filled up the watering cans, pulled out the scissors, and made my first stab. I started pulling off the dead leaves. One by one. Immediately things looked brighter, cleaner, and one of the leaves even started waving it thanks. Waving? I took a closer look.

A lovely, alien praying mantis was dangling from the rosebush. She maneuvered her stick-like legs, trying to find a better perch. I watched in awe. Something wonderful had chosen to make her home here. I had a guest in my overgrown jungle.

Right then I decided, I would fix the place up. Weed out the clover, haul back the petunias, and replace the dead plants. And this time, I would fill my garden with oranges and yellows. This time, it would look like me.

Sitting down at my computer this morning and opening my novel revision, I make the same decision. Time to prune and replant. And somewhere in this tangle of words, maybe I’ll find a surprise guest.

Let me set the scene. Down in the valley, there lies a land called the “Holy Spirit Retreat Center.” This placid setting of zen-like landscaping is just a set-up to expose those of us with hard-to-control impulses. For starters, there’s a giant bell that makes a delicious gonging noise right there in the courtyard. Anyone could’ve just walked up and rung it! What kind of world do we live in that has bells just lying around to tempt all?

Then there was a circular patch of grass that had a sidewalk circling around it… but there was also a slightly worn footpath short-cutting straight through the middle. Every time you walked in that direction you had to make the decision. Go around the ‘right’ way? Or cut across the grass? I wanted to give into temptation, but I was sure there were cameras that the nuns were monitoring.

I haven’t even mentioned the duck pond with its rock-throwing possibilities or the constant access to coffee or the giant basket of little candy bars that I wanted to steal all the Butterfingers out of. I think I’ll stop now… I might cry.

But there was one bright spot in this torturous retreat. Julie Williams, an phenomenal wordsmith, writer, and artist, did a session called “Words and Images, Images and Words.” She spoke and demonstrated ways to generate ideas when we need a little help with our writing. One of the simple, but wonderful, exercises she did with us used a series of four writing prompts.

We each started with a random image that had been handed to us. Mine was a magazine picture of several pieces of blue fabric draping down, like the folds of a woman’s dress. We did a continuous free-write for 2 minutes about the picture. Then we got a piece of fabric to add to the mix, mine was a piece of lace. 2 more minutes of writing. Then a button was added (an old, small, white one). An finally a word (jack).

Each item made the ’speed’ story we were writing grow richer and richer. And my prompts led me into the world of my next book complete with textured, opening scenes. I was astounded by the truth of something I thought I already knew. Physical objects can ground fiction in a way that nothing else can. They breathe life and energy and exactness into your writing.

Of course, I wanted to keep my writing prompts. As I was sneakily slipping them into my bag, convinced that they would be taken away from us, just as we got inspired, I heard Julie say, “You can keep your objects to remind you of what you’ve written today.” I sighed. I was guilt-free. Maybe I’d go outside and ring that bell after all.